Ashes of the Tyrant

by Erin M. Evans

  “No,” Mot said through his teeth.

  “Because we’re not supposed to meddle.”

  “It’s not meddling.” Mot seemed to roll back into himself, disappearing into the air. Olla made a little irritated noise, but he followed.

  Farideh kept her eyes on the tomb, her nerves thrumming. The imps would be fine, she thought. This could stop more murders from happening. This could protect Djerad Thymar. This would mean she didn’t have to call Lorcan down and ask him what else smelled the way he did. She blew out a breath.

  Havilar was leaning against the wall again, one arm wrapped around her stomach.

  “Are you going to throw up again?” Farideh asked. “Is it nerves or just the smell?”

  “Oh gods, if you don’t just forget that, I swear,” Havilar started. The imps interrupted her, returning with another pop.

  “It stinks in there,” Mot said as soon as he landed. “What is that?”

  “Dead bodies?” Havilar said.

  “No,” Olla said. “It smells like—”

  “Nobody cares,” Mot interrupted. “The runes are Dethek, but that’s not Dwarvish. Not anything I’ve ever seen.”

  “It looks like Abyssal.”

  “It’s not godsbedamned Abyssal, Olla,” Mot said. “Do you think I can’t spot Abyssal?”

  “Where did it go?” Farideh asked.

  “Boil me alive if I know, Lady,” Mot said. “Honestly, it looks like it didn’t open all the way.”

  “Then why does it smell like brimstone?” Farideh asked.

  Mot shrugged. “It opened enough? If I had to guess, someone shut it down.”

  “It smells like dretches,” Olla piped up. “That’s what that smell reminds me of.”

  Mot looked back over his shoulder, glowering at Olla. “It’s not shitting Abyssal!”

  “We should report the smell in any case. That’s protocol.”

  “You don’t have to report everything you think you smell,” Mot said. He shook his head at Havilar. “This is your fault, you know. You still got the hellhound?”

  “I’m not done with her.”

  Mot muttered something that made Farideh’s skin crawl. “Fine. Tell us if you need something again.” And with that, he and Olla vanished into the ether.

  “Well, great spitting lot of help that was,” Havilar said.

  “Maybe whatever killed them came out of the portal partway?” Farideh said. “Maybe they closed it before it could get through?”

  “Maybe the portal’s not the important part,” Havilar said. She sighed and tugged her braid nervously. “Come on, I feel sick again. Whatever a dretch is, I don’t want to ever find one.”

  FROM THE SHADOWS of the passage beyond the Verthisathurgiesh crypt, Dumuzi watched Ophinshtalajiir and Shestandeliath dragonborn carry bodies past on stretchers, covered with sheets of cloth. Dread uncoiled in his heart. He should have been here to talk them out of it. He should have never left with Baruz putting madness in the others’ ears, with Ravar giving them tools they couldn’t manage. He should have never left Zaroshni.

  “What will the elders say if they find out what you’re planning?” Dumuzi had demanded of her, before his father had sent him to hunt for Clanless Mehen. “You are throwing every generation’s struggle in their faces. You are tilling up the very concept of throtominarr!”

  “They have already tilled it up and thrown it in the midden,” Zaroshni said haughtily. “They’ve given up. They’ve traded true integrity to play at this world’s games, giving tyrants and enemies honors they did not earn, bowing to the disrespect of nations who did not fight as we did.”

  What price is that honor now? Dumuzi thought as Shestandeliath carried a stretcher by. Zaroshni or Parvida or Ravar? They were all masked and hidden by the sheets. How could they have saved the Lost if they weren’t prepared for what lay between the worlds?

  You don’t know what happened, Dumuzi thought.

  But he knew this much: they were dead. Zaroshni was gone. Zaroshni and Parvida and Baruz and ancestors only knew who else.

  Footsteps whispered through the stone, the faintest disturbance of Djerad Thymar. Dumuzi whirled toward them, drawing the dagger from his sleeve. Zaroshni stood in the shadows of a cross-passage a stone’s throw away, and Dumuzi nearly dropped the weapon as he shoved it back into its sheath.

  He took a step forward, ready to embrace her, every part of him needing to feel Zaroshni solid in his arms. “You’re alive!”

  Zaroshni blinked. “Yes. And so are you.”

  At that, Dumuzi remembered himself. He stopped, folded his hands together. “I … I don’t know who else. The bodies …” He swallowed against the lump in his throat. “Chaubashk vur kepeshk karshoji, this is what I warned you about. What were they thinking?”

  Zaroshni considered him a moment. “Perhaps they weren’t.”

  Dumuzi’s heart clenched at her distance, but he masked it. There was too much now to think of. “Listen, we have to see the others, the other Liberators. Find out who’s alive still and who knows what happened. Make sure all the dead are accounted for in case one of them …” He trailed off. It was too awful to consider that one of his misguided friends might have become a murderer. It was too awful to consider letting them roam free if that was so. “There were more than twelve of you fools. I know that much.”

  Zaroshni’s brow ridges scrunched up, and she tilted her head, sending her silver piercing chain swinging. He looked away from that silent rebuke. “Wouldn’t someone have said if they were missing?”

  Dumuzi frowned—perhaps she was in shock? “You said you were being careful. That no one knew what you were planning. I assumed you were among them—why wouldn’t I?” He clacked his teeth once, as if he could shake the tension building, building in his stomach. “I’m so glad you’re safe,” he blurted.

  Zaroshni nodded, her mouth twisting as if she were trying to smile and scream in the same moment. She took a step toward him. “Can you help me remember who will not be missed?”

  Shocked, Dumuzi thought, surely shocked. He risked impropriety, stroked a hand down her arm. “You will recover, I swear. I’ll help you, though—we have to move fast. We have to tell the elders.”

  Zaroshni moved close, close enough Dumuzi stepped back. “I don’t think that’s wise,” she said.

  Footfalls again—but these were so much nearer. Dumuzi leaped back against the wall and saw Clanless Mehen standing there, looking down at the two young people. He looked so like Patriarch Pandjed that Dumuzi’s heart leaped up with old fear—

  “What are you doing here?” Mehen demanded.

  Dumuzi mastered himself. “Apologies,” he said. “I overheard … Are they … Are they all dead?”

  At that, Mehen’s fierce expression softened. “I’m sorry. You were agemates with them, weren’t you?” His teeth gaped a moment, anxious and riled, before he laid a hand on Dumuzi’s shoulder, something Pandjed never did. “We’ll find out what happened. We’ll catch the one who did this.”

  Dumuzi met Zaroshni’s dark eyes—he feared they would and they wouldn’t in equal measure. This is where the Liberators’ selfish “honor” had brought them. Zaroshni’s expression didn’t waver.

  “This is Shestandeliath Zaroshni,” Dumuzi said. “Daughter of Baishir. I think … She might be in shock.” I might be in shock, Dumuzi thought.

  “Come on,” Mehen said to the both of them. “Let’s get you home.”

  Zaroshni smiled that strange-sick smile. “Of course. Thank you.”

  4

  17 Nightal, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR)

  Eastern Thesk Mountains

  PHRENIKE MADE FOR A SORRY LICH, THE GHOST OF BRYSEIS KAKISTOS thought. Where once her confederate had seemed a sleek and lovely Amnian woman, whose features were perhaps a bit too pointed, whose gaze was perhaps a bit too penetrating, whose movements were perhaps a bit too abrupt, now the tiefling warlock was little more than bones held together by gaudily gilded sine
ws, draped in a fitted lavender gown that mocked her fleshless body. Her gaze still penetrated, two motes of violet light in the depths of her cavernous eyes.

  “I would say it’s astonishing to see you in such a state, but let us be honest,” Phrenike drawled, “you were always more a zealot than a pathfinder. Not eager for risk, but blind to it.”

  And you were a toady, Bryseis Kakistos snapped, trapped inside the skull of a cambion woman who stood before the lich on her throne.

  “Do you want me to repeat that?” Sairché said under her breath. Brazen little pretender, Bryseis Kakistos thought.

  Ask her about the spell, she said. If this is where we must begin, then begin it already.

  Sairché bristled all around the ghost, but she smiled at Phrenike. “We’re in search of a spell. Something that can divide a soul. The Brimstone Angel says you know it.”

  “Did something happen with Alyona?” Phrenike asked, too sweetly.

  The name sent a cascade of memories over the ghost. The bone-deep tug of another spirit bound to hers. A filthy city street, buildings whose bones were sap-stained pine logs, and her child-hand in a passing pocket. Herself, younger, wide-eyed, saying, Bisera, we shouldn’t be here—

  Bryseis Kakistos snapped back to the tower in the hinterlands, the lich, and the cambion, the edges of her stitched-together soul feeling frayed and fragile. A moment passed while she focused on sealing herself up.

  Stop, she told Sairché. This will go better if I do the talking.

  The cambion’s mind darted along the wall she’d built of her thoughts. Bryseis Kakistos might once have been the most powerful warlock packed to the Nine Hells, might still be imbued with the powers of Asmodeus, but Sairché was proving to be as canny as her sire. She’d made her offer of aid, partitions already in place. Bryseis Kakistos would not be able to read her thoughts, to wrest control away, with such boundaries in place.

  At least, that was what Sairché thought.

  Phrenike can manage it, Bryseis Kakistos said instead. Tell her to cast the spell.

  “She wishes to speak to you directly,” Sairché said. “She says you have a spell that could manage it.”

  The lich chuckled, and Bryseis Kakistos seethed at the reversal of their positions. The last time she’d spoken to the tiefling warlock had been more than sixty years ago, in Chondath, shortly before Bryseis Kakistos met her end. They had been friendly—never friends—and Phrenike had promised to see to all of Bryseis’s lingering plans with all her usual fulsome praise and promises.

  Now, Phrenike waved her wand over Sairché, as though she were nothing but a haunted bit of armor. The spell wrapped around the ghost like a burning fist—not only could she speak, she would have to speak. How times changed.

  “She looks familiar,” Phrenike said, conversationally. “She’s one of Caisys’s get, isn’t she?”

  Patently, Bryseis Kakistos said.

  Phrenike chuckled again. To Sairché she said, “Your papa was something else.”

  Simmering annoyance and uncertainty surrounded Bryseis Kakistos—Sairché didn’t like the reminder of that fact she could never tease out on her own. “So I hear,” she said, as if it didn’t matter in the least. “Knowing my mother, he’d have to be.”

  Quiet. It’s not Alyona, Bryseis Kakistos said, bringing them back to the matter at hand. It’s Asmodeus.

  “Well,” Phrenike said after a moment. “You have gone mad. You can’t undo what we did.”

  That’s what you think.

  Phrenike laughed. “Delightfully, delightfully mad. I can tell you right now, that spell won’t work on a god.”

  “It’s not for the god,” Sairché said.

  I need the rest of my soul, Bryseis Kakistos said, ignoring Sairché. Two parts of it are trapped in what should have been my vessel.

  “You mean Caisys’s seditious little leaving wasn’t your first choice?” Phrenike drawled. What was left of her face grinned at Sairché, the violet lights of her eyes twinkling. “Don’t worry—she loves seditious. Don’t let her pretend she doesn’t.”

  “Hand over the spell,” Sairché said, as if she could channel her fearsome mother.

  I told you to stay quiet, Bryseis Kakistos said. To Phrenike she said, I know you remember it.

  “I don’t,” the lich said. “Besides, do you forget? That spell didn’t work the way you expected it to, after the Spellplague came. Times may have changed, but not that much. The gods still don’t want you to have it.” The remnants of her flesh twitched. “One in particular, eh, cambion?”

  All around the ghost, Sairché’s rage flickered, incandescent. The presence of two magic rings flit through her thoughts, too quick for the ghost to assess what they might do. Bryseis Kakistos felt her thoughts coil in. This was not going as she’d planned.

  When the cambion had offered her assistance—seeking to gain the favor of her archduchess, she said without saying—she’d been silver-tongued and smooth, persuasive in the way the devils of the Nine Hells always were, with the faint air of desperation that meant she was willing to reach beyond the hierarchy.

  Now, it seemed more and more, Sairché reached because she did not understand her place.

  “I suggest you find another solution—your last one might suffice.” Phrenike tilted her head. “What did you do with her when you decided to roam free?”

  “Who?” Sairché asked under her breath.

  Don’t concern yourself, Bryseis Kakistos said, not knowing what Phrenike meant.

  “If you are keeping things from me,” Sairché began.

  Quiet, Bryseis Kakistos said. She considered Phrenike, considered all the things the lich wouldn’t say in front of Sairché, and all the secrets her former follower might know. Phrenike kept smiling at Sairché, as she flicked her wrist and let the spell that gave Bryseis voice fade.

  It was time to take a risk.

  Bryseis Kakistos struck, swift as an arrow, shifting herself past the magical barriers Sairché had erected in her own mind. The walls were strong, but they were common, the sort of spells Bryseis Kakistos had been familiar with before Sairché was ever born, before Caisys the Vicelord ever lay down with Exalted Invadiah. A few tendays of study and testing were all that Bryseis Kakistos had needed to bring the limitations clear in her broken thoughts, and she’d had practice enough lately to make the possession firm.

  Sairché’s consciousness flashed in a burst of panic, then went still and numb. Bryseis Kakistos flexed the cambion’s red fingers, her batlike wings. For the moment, Sairché was sleeping, but the ghost didn’t have long before the cambion regained control.

  “Well,” Phrenike said, looking faintly surprised after all. “I take it she doesn’t know you can do that?”

  “Not yet,” Bryseis Kakistos said with the cambion’s voice. The lights of Phrenike’s eyes danced, and Bryseis Kakistos thought perhaps she wasn’t the only one who was a little mad, a little zealous. The lich inclined her head.

  “O Brimstone Angel,” she said, with a familiar hint of mockery Phrenike always had, “what can I do for you?”

  “Who else still lives?” Bryseis said. “I need the spell.” It wasn’t the most important part—she felt sure of that, even if she couldn’t quite remember why—but it would become necessary soon enough.

  “I told you the truth,” Phrenike said. “None of us can help you with this—the Weave is broken.”

  “They say it’s repairing itself.”

  The lich shrugged. “How long will that take? And will it all be the same? It’s a lot of waiting and no less risk. I still don’t understand how you wound up like this. Wasn’t that the point of the brats? What happened to that new-grown body you always planned?”

  “Beshaba,” Bryseis Kakistos said, spitting at the name of the goddess of foul luck. “I’m seeing to it. But I need the spell. I’m running out of time.”

  Phrenike sighed. “I didn’t mention this,” she said significantly, “but there’s only a few … entities one can reall
y expect to hold onto that kind of magic come Sundering or Spellplague.”

  Bryseis Kakistos felt Sairché’s face reflect her surprise. “Archlords?”

  Phrenike gave her a look that might have been contemptuous with a little more skin. “Please,” she said. “They’ll turn on you all over again. I’m talking about the demon lords.”

  “No,” Bryseis Kakistos said. “They can’t be bargained with.”

  “But they do tear souls up. If you want a spell like this, you’d better be prepared to ride your cambion down into the Abyss and get down on your knees for Orcus himself again.” Phrenike considered the cambion. “How seditious is she really?”

  “I’m still finding out,” Bryseis Kakistos said.

  Phrenike stood, her bony feet clacking on the stone floor as she crossed the room to a chest against the far wall. From within, she collected a small jar, half-filled with glass capsules. She gave it a little shake, and the core of every one lit with a faint green flame.

  “Here,” she said. “Never say I didn’t help you.”

  “What are they?”

  “Let’s say they’ll make her a little less fussy about being seditious,” Phrenike said. “When she’s ready to wake up, snap one under her nose and inhale the vapors. Whatever has changed, whatever’s unfamiliar or missing, she’ll accept it as how things ought to be. So you can go where you need to, get what you need to, talk to who you wish. They’re very handy when it comes to minions.” Her violet eyes glittered coldly. “Cleans up a lot of messes before they happen.”

  Bryseis Kakistos took the jar. “Thank you, Phrenike.”

  “Don’t let her find them, though,” Phrenike added. “She might accept them, but then she might use them up.”

  The capsules glowed in the cambion’s red hands. Bryseis Kakistos weighed her options, the plethora of pathways that lay open to her suddenly. Each one leads to Asmodeus’s comeuppance, she thought, smiling to herself. She did need the spells—so she would need her old books, and so she would need to track down which of her descendants had access to them. She needed the staff, no doubt still lost in the Nine Hells, and enough warlocks to fill out a circle.